alt Hacker NewsGodot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
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Interesting that on one hand the valuation of these AI providers is based on the assumption that all code (and everything else producing digital artefacts) will be written using AI in the near future, on the other hand almost all popular open source projects fight to keep AI contributions out. Hard to reconcile.
Personally I'm also experiencing a bit of AI hangover after using it a lot in my own open-source projects. I find it's a bit like taking drugs (not that I have much experience with that) in the sense that in the moment I'm using these tools I feel great and powerful, writing features in a span of hours that would've taken me weeks to write by hand. But inevitably some time later I will look at the code and notice all the subtle cracks and inconsistencies the tool introduced, and despair a bit at the mess.
I now plan to use these tools less for extensive feature development and more for planning, debugging and narrow refactoring where I can put very strict guardrails on them. I'd still say it accelerates my work but not by a factor of 10, more like 1.5-3 (which is still a lot) given the care you need to ensure what is being built is actually good. For what I really like these tools is that I need less mental focus to do coding, but on the other hand I have this new kind of fatigue of being in a constant chat loop with a machine and trying to get it to do stuff based on natural language, never knowing how it will interpret what I write and wrote before. In that sense, these tools don't feel satisfying, it's like operating a machine where you try to push some buttons to get it to do something but the internal wiring changes all the time so you never know exactly what a given button combination will do and you have to figure it out by watching the machine and constantly adapting.
"If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review," the Foundation said.
That is to the point!
There are some curated lists of no-AI software. Would be nice to have an index / plot of how that changes in time.
I'm getting the feeling that many people here are mostly reacting to the title instead of reading the actual policy: they state that an important part of the reason is that they use PR review to train new contributors and find possible future maintainers.
Irrespective of the quality of ai-contributions, that seems hard to argue with.
(unless you believe ai will make the whole concept of OS contributions / maintenance redundant. If that's your belief I don't think it makes much sense to submit PR's to Godot though, instead of just forking the engine and having your agents work on it)
Perhaps move comments to source posted yesterday? 30-jun-2026 "Changes to Our Contribution Policies" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733236 9 comments
AI accidentally found one of the most expensive resources in the industry: the free time of people who maintain open source in the evenings after their day job
The foundation points out something that has always been true, but AI has really brought to the forefront, that any contributor, including AI, could potentially not be relied on to maintain this patch in the future.
This is the core of the issue, not that someone uses AI, but that it’s just one of many smells a patch can have that indicates someone doesn’t understand what they’re submitting. You could be breaking variable naming conventions, changing APIs you shouldn’t, making amateur language mistakes, all indicate that yes, maybe the patch does work, but that there are other good reasons to reject it.
A way around this might be to mark a PR as rejected because of AI and then ask the author to point out some part of it they’re particularly proud of and explain in their own words, not a wall of AI text, what this does and why they like it. Just something where the author has to show that they have something an AI can’t, namely taste and an opinion.
Do those AI contributors really think they are helping out? Don't they get, that they are destroying such projects with their "work"? Why do they spend money for stuff nobody wants and gets rejected. I don't get it... Don't these people have any hobbies? Or are these free-roaming OpenClaw instances that have been forgotten by their creator and are now doing their own thing?
Banning the PRs is the easy part. The funny bit is that "understands their own code" is now a filter worth writing down.
Godot's new contribution policy: https://godotengine.org/article/contribution-policy-2026/
I'm not sure I agree with the policy, but I'm glad we are seeing different project experimenting with different policies. So after a while we can probably see how things shake out in the end.
Definitely sympathetic to their policy, but AI tooling and quality are changing quite fast. In a year I'd expect a modification of this as AI agents get better in virtually every possible way.
Totally valid.
If someone thinks they're building better open source with their AI, let them fork; their AI can maintain downstream. If it's really better, people will join the fork. Good luck.
In all likelihood anyone attempting this will realize the value that a maintainer provides. On the odd chance they discover a new working model and produce better software, all the better, everyone wins.
...the influx of contributions authored or submitted by AI is sapping the projects' maintainers of their willingness to confront the "already tedious" work of reviewing pull requests....
Don't get me wrong, slop is slop, no matter if AI or entirely human-fabricated. But just like AI-assisted coding can actually be helpful, why can't AI-assisted PR reviews make it less tedious?
Why base the decision on what tools are used by the author and not on the quality of their past contributions?
Underlying announcement might be a better link:
https://godotengine.org/article/contribution-policy-2026/
I predict this won't last long in any extreme version in any significant open source repo.
Banning AI-slop is one thing, but AI as a properly used co-programmer is becoming more and more capable and shutting out well-guided AI will enable competitors who don't to edge and then power ahead.
There are obviously problems to solve here, but blanket bans (while understandable in under-resourced maintenance environments) aren't anything more than a short-term buffer.
If AI is so good, there should be hundreds of new engines far exceeding Godot.
Yet all that is being produced is piggy-backing unchecked vibe-slop.
In many ways this makes sense. I noticed other projects struggle with this as well. AI slop spam kills time available.
On the other hand ... it is a bit strange though, because what if code contributions objectively improve something? I dislike AI slop spam, but from a purely objective point of view, I am not sure it should be forbidden based on it intrinsically making a change, which COULD be an improve. Now I am also aware of the AI slop spam worsening things; ton of documentation is useless, look at what matz produces with claude, this seems to be written purely by an alien, aka AI. I don't understand anything that this AI generates. But I think from an objective point of view, I'd actually lean more towards not completely disallowing AI slop contribution. The issue seems largely with:
a) the quality
b) the amount of text generated
Both these problems, in my opinion, could be solved. The time required by a real human to look at it, though, will always be a bottleneck, so perhaps the more honest answer would be that humans don't have enough time for contributions from skynet.
Just put it behind a paywall for PR prioritization or consideration, more payment to jump the queue.
There, I solved FOSS sponsorship.
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oh shoot, anyway
Godot is one of the worst run open source projects with a crawling pace since 2014.
While I agree with the general message, and wish it will eventually radiate to cooperations as well, it is obviously a decision driven by feelings, not logic.
The idea that you can't trust code that was generated by heavy users of AI, because _they_ don't understand it enough to fix it, is false, because they can use AI to fix it.
In general, I have hard time understanding how one might even block other contributors from using ai.
It's a fair policy. Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. I can only imagine how frustrating this can get in open projects that get a lot of contributions.
However, I don't think this will discourage AI-based coding at all. In fact, I see two potential outcomes of these policies:
- Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier.
- Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments - "here's the code, here's why I made that change, here are the effects of that change". Even if AI-generated, these small contributions may become much easier to verify & validate. We may even see some standardization in terms of what qualifies as an appropriately sized contribution, what requires more thorough review (e.g., adding unverified dependencies), etc.
I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.